Managed Tokenisation Service For Personally Identifiable Information

Cloud based tokenisation as a service offering from nuBridges brings improved security and compliance for electronic health records and personally identifiable information

nuBridges has announced Protect Tokenization as a Service (TaaS), the first cloud-based tokenization service for national and multi-national companies that want to protect Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Electronic Health Records (EHR) to improve security, reduce risk, ease compliance and minimize data security costs. Hosted by Verizon Business on its Computing as a Service (CaaS) platform, the new service is equally adept at protecting payment cards to help merchants comply with the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

nuBridges Protect TaaS is a managed tokenization service that uses nuBridges Protect Token Manager to protect credit cards and other types of structured sensitive data such as social security numbers, National Insurance Numbers, driving licences, passports, salaries, addresses, account numbers and credit card numbers in a PCI-compliant cloud. To use nuBridges TaaS, customers enable one or more of their systems to interact with TaaS via web services. Administration, configuration, key management and operations are handled by nuBridges to relieve customers of day-to-day data security tasks related to data tokenization.

“Outsourced tokenization is an effective strategy for securing credit cards and it’s a natural progression to use it to protect PII and EHR,” said Avivah Litan, VP Distinguished Analyst, Gartner. “We expect to see it become a commonplace data protection strategy for a wide variety of data types as more companies exploit secure cloud-based tokenization services from trusted data security vendors.”

nuBridges is the first data security company to offer Format Preserving Tokenization™ on-premise and as a managed service in the cloud, giving customers a choice on how to tokenize any type of confidential information. Unlike other tokenization service providers, nuBridges guarantees customers ownership of their tokenized data, including the token/data relationship, should the service contract be cancelled. What’s more, companies that use nuBridges TaaS can still use their payment gateway and payment processors of choice.

nuBridges Protect TaaS provides several other benefits to merchants, financial services, insurance and hospitality companies and health care organizations, including the following:

* Reduces PCI DSS scope — Since credit cards are no longer stored on-site, most systems are taken out of scope, thereby minimizing an organization’s internal cardholder data environment and reducing the cost of compliance.

* Reduces management requirements — nuBridges TaaS reduces IT management requirements since most of the tokenization implementation, operational and monitoring functions are handled by nuBridges.

* Retains referential integrity — nuBridges maps tokens to credit card numbers; not to transactions as many other tokenization outsourcers do. Because nuBridges TaaS maintains referential integrity — a 1:1 relationship — between sensitive data and tokens, sales and marketing analysis, fraud analysis, and other mission critical business functions can be performed as usual.

* Limitless data retention — Unlike other tokenization outsources, nuBridges will store data for customers for as long as desired. Other outsourcers typically maintain 24 months of data even though most customers need to retain up to seven years of data for audits.

“Securing sensitive data such as PII, EHR and cardholder information is difficult and expensive for many organizations,” said Gary Palgon, nuBridges vice president of Product Management. “Compliance with privacy laws and data security mandates such as PCI DSS can be burdensome. Many organizations are seeking relief from the day-to-day operations associated with tokenization, but are wary of vendor lock-in with payment processor and payment gateway tokenization service providers. nuBridges TaaS provides that relief at a low entry cost without vendor lock-in; yet it provides the same quality of ‘on-premise’ Format Preserving Tokenization as nuBridges Protect Token Manager.”